NetBSD/sparc64 news archive

November 2005

2005-11-02: NetBSD 2.1 released

NetBSD 2.1,
the first maintenance release of the netbsd-2 release branch,
has been released with binary distributions for 48 architectures.
More information is available in the 2.1 release
announcement.

June 2005

2005-06-06: X support complet

Finally we can now declare our X support complete. The current
tree contains working support for cgsix (sbus) framebuffers,
ffb/afb (UPA) framebuffers and ATI based (pci) vga chipsets.
This code has been (or will be) pulled up to the 3.0 branch
in time for the upcoming 3.0 release.

April 2005

2005-04-29: Switch to wscons complete

Sparc64 now uses the generic wscons framework.
This is good news for users of usb keyboard machines
and a big step forward to complete X server support.
See the announcement
on the port-sparc64 mailinglist for details.

February 2005

2005-02-17: Sleep sleeps forever no more

We believe that Chuck Silvers recently fixed the famous
sleep-sleeps-forever bug in -current. A pullup to the 2.x branch
will be requested after some additional testing.
See the commit message
and corresponding problem report
for details.

A simple bug in the bootblock forth code has been fixed so now
booting from a root file system on a Raid Frame RAID 1 device
is possible. The setup is very easy: just follow the
instructions,
ignoring everything i386 specific like MBRs.

A NetBSD/sparc64 1.5.1_BETA2 snapshot, based off of 1.5.1 sources
as of 2001-05-18, is now available in the NetBSD/sparc64
snapshot area of the ftp server. (snapshot deprecated.
NetBSD 1.5.1 was released on
July 11th, 2001)

February 2001

2001-02-26: NetBSD/sparc64 LKMs now work

Matthew Green has committed a tiny change to <sys/lkm.h>
to fix LKM's on the NetBSD/sparc64 port. To take advantage of this,
you will need to rebuild your kernel and modload(1) with the fixed
<sys/lkm.h>. Trying to load a LKM on an old kernel will cause
a panic, and using an old modload(1) will return ENOTTY (Inappropriate
ioctl for device).

Update: This has been pulled into the netbsd-1-5 branch, so it will
be available in NetBSD 1.5.1.

2001-02-10: New COMPAT_SVR4_32 option

Eduardo Horvath has added a COMPAT_SVR4_32 option to NetBSD-current.
By including it in your kernel configuration file, you can have
compatibility for 32-bit SVR4 binaries in NetBSD/sparc64.

2001-02-04: New netbsd32_compat14 and netbsd32_compat15 packages

Matthew Green has added the netbsd32_compat14
and netbsd32_compat15
packages to pkgsrc.
These two packages contain 32-bit NetBSD/sparc a.out
(netbsd32_compat14) and elf (netbsd32_compat15) shared
libraries. They can be used to add compatibility for
dynamically linked a.out and elf executables, compiled
under NetBSD/sparc, to NetBSD/sparc64.

Charles Hannum has uploaded an experimental snapshot with
shared libraries. This is just a big tar file of the whole installation,
with a kernel in /netbsd. The snapshot is located at
ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/incoming/mycroft/sparc64.tgz.
More information on the snapshot is available in Charles' message in the port-sparc64
mail archive.